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Being a bi parent is a bit like having a super power. A super power that you really don’t want and which gives you the ability to feel both highly conspicuous and completely invisible. An impostor in Parentland. It feels isolating, but I am certain I am around other queer people on a daily basis who feel just as closeted as I do by the culture that surrounds parenting infants.

I think an identity shift when becoming a parent is quite common, but my sexuality is something that has stayed consistent. I have always been bi, even before I knew that that was what I should call myself. This is not the same for everyone, and that’s perfectly valid too. My sexuality would still matter even if I only started identifying as bi since becoming a parent, or last week, or just yesterday.

We at Biscuitare constantly surprised how many people simply don’t know that a vibrant and active bisexual community exists in the UK. In the digital age it’s much easier than ever before to connect with people just like you, but what did people do before Google? We asked Marcus Morgan of the Bisexual Index to tell us how he found a community he could call home.

The story of how I came to find the UK bisexual community is one I tell often – if you’ve heard it before I apologise – but it’s a useful example of the subtle, or perhaps not so subtle, biphobia we encounter. Of the way we are delegitimised with the kindest intentions.

I was 21 years old. I worked in a high street insurance brokers on the outskirts of London. I had keys to lock up the shop so I waited… Continue reading →

I am not your unicorn. I’m not interested in threesomes. I don’t want to share my body with people I neither know, nor trust. I’m not going to show up at your apartment with lingerie beneath my trenchcoat and play out your girl/girl/boy fantasy. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy group sex, I just don’t enjoy you, or your approach to it.

I understand that as an unpartnered polyamorous bisexual, I’m expected to be available for casual group sex any time, any place, with as little as an hour’s notice. And to that, I say, “Fuck you, pay me.” I am completely uninterested in casual sex with strangers, and since my profile is quite clear about that, it baffles me that you’d persist in asking.

Why do so many of you insist on rudely propositioning single women online for threesomes?… Continue reading →

We’re all wrong sometimes. The key to our character lies in how we cope with that. An apology can go a long way to righting our wrongs, but, says El, only if we mean it.

I had some, shall we say, ‘interesting’ interactions with another writer a few days ago. Now, I can’t say I take criticism perfectly myself, I’m a human being, I get defensive. I think almost everyone does. However, there are ways to deal with criticism, and this writer chose one of the worst. They felt it necessary to engage in a very public, rather unbecoming, debacle that took the form of a facebook thread.I usually try to stay out of such things unless there’s a potential story in it, or some genuine discussion to be had, as changing the minds of strangers on the internet is generally only worthwhile if one is being paid… Continue reading →

The bi-osphere (geddit!) has reacted angrily to the suggestion from one of our own that we ought to ‘give up men’. Arguments have been made on the basis of gender diversity, self-actualisation and repression.

Our Ed Libby thinks they’re missing one vital point.

Since the Gay Liberation movement first found its feet way back in the 1970s it has been asking bi women to call themselves lesbian, seek only relationships with women, and generally refuse to acknowledge their attraction to anyone else. It was, we were told, not fair to muddy the waters with multi-gender attraction. Better to stick to one and make things easy. It was an act of solidarity, they said. Attraction to one gender is just easier for people to understand. After all, weren’t we all working towards the same goal?

Similarly within the feminist movement, both bi- and heterosexuality were, in some quarters, roundly… Continue reading →

Yesterday, we published a response to the HuffPo blog ‘Calling All Bi Women – Give up Men’. Our inbox has been stuffed ever since. You aren’t happy and you’ve got a lot to say.

Usually, we have a rule against publishing more than one response to an online article. Today we’re breaking that rule to provide two more rebuttals. And then, we promise, we’re never talking about it again.

I logged onto Twitter this afternoon to find all of the bisexual accounts and organisations I follow talking about a recent HuffPo article. And not favourably.

The title alone made me recoil – Calling All Bi Women – Give Up Men! But I know that headlines are usually written by subeditors, rather than writers. They can be designed to drive clicks, rather than accurately reflecting the content. So I decided to read on.

When Huffington Post published a blog by Kylie Barton entitled “Calling Bisexual Women: Give Up Men!”, bisexual twitter exploded. Tweet after tweet came in, calling out the blog’s author for internalised biophobia, hierarchical thinking, and logical fallacy after logical fallacy. In a community where gay men and women frequently posit that their relationships outrank ours on the scale of queer, here was a bi woman doing it too.

Buckle in, because it’s going to get bumpy.

This entire response can be summed up in one word: No. However, that wouldn’t make a very good article, so I shall continue.
I won’t stop dating men, just as I won’t stop dating women, and I won’t stop dating nonbinary people. I won’t have anyone else policing my romantic or sexual life, regardless of their sexuality. I don’t fuck with biphobic respectability politics from within our outside of the LGBT+ community,… Continue reading →

Bisexual “reality” “star” Tila Tequila, who has long posted images to the internet of herself in Nazi garb, publicly praised Hitler and who was kicked off Celebrity Big Brother in 2015 for antisemitism, has shocked the liberal establishment by being photographed performing a Nazi salute.

Self described ‘Alt-reich queen’ Tila Tequila, who once starred in her own MTV faux-reality show A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, where male and female competitors vied for a relationship with the singerwriter internet celebrity, has been pictured alongside white supremacists Richard B Spencer and Chuck Johnson with their right arms raised in a Nazi salute. Tequila, since suspended from Twitter under its new hate speech rules, uploaded the image to the social media platform along side the caption ‘seig heil’ (sic).

The Asian-American star, who claimed in 2012 to be converting to Judaism, has a long history of Nazi sympathising,… Continue reading →

Christopher Biggins’ biphobic remarks have been ruled acceptable by Ofcom. That’s not great news, but there is a sunny side to this situation, says Dr Helen Bowes-Catton of BiUK.

It’s not fashionable to admit it, but this whole Biggins-Big-Brother-biphobia saga really cheers me up- and not just because it’s so delightfully alliterative. I know that’s an odd thing to say, but bear with me and I’ll explain.

Now don’t get me wrong, I was really disappointed that Ofcom, responding to complaints about Biggins’ biphobic remarks on Celebrity Big Brother, incomprehensibly decided that, actually it was ok to be offensive about bisexuals on national TV. Like a lot of people, I found myself speculating wryly about the likelihood of a contestant getting away with similar remarks about lesbians or gay men. But on balance, the way this whole thing has played out seems to me to offer more reasons… Continue reading →

We mainly think about biphobia in terms of harm to bisexual-identified people, but in reality it can affect anyone. Holly Matthies examines one of the more insidious ways it can manifest.

For me, Pride means minding the stalls for the political party I belong to and the local bisexual support/social group Biphoria. I love it: you’re away from the worst of the overwhelming crowds, and people come over if they’re at all interested in your stall and ignore you if they’re not. It’s nice to feel helpful: to hand out stickers and flyers, answer questions, let people know what we do.

It didn’t take long after I first started doing this at Pride (in Manchester, though I’ve since been to various ones across the northwest), in 2009 or so, to start expecting that something unpleasant would happen when I sat down behind a trestle-table full of purple bisexual literature… Continue reading →